A large volume of the world's mail comprises letters fed into envelopes using a machine called an inserter. Large volume inserters have been manufactured by companies such as Bell & Howell and Pitney-Bowes. Traditionally, the automatic feeding of letters into envelopes involved the positioning of stacks of paper or a stream of continuous paper on a raceway that carries various sheets of paper in a predetermined manner to the inserter which holds a stack of at least 500 envelopes in a hopper that may be more than 15" high. When each set of combined sheets reaches the inserter, the sheets are folded and placed into a waiting envelope. The envelope may then be sealed or left open for further contents insertion and output from the inserter.
In the past, each piece of material to be fed into a particular envelope had to be sent down the raceway to the envelope one piece at a time in a prechosen order until the envelope was filled. More recently industry has developed means for gathering different sheets and materials in a separate sub-hopper that receives the various contents to be inserted from a variety of sources, gathers them into one packet (such as a multiple page letter or statement) and then transfers this packet down the raceway to the inserter. Such secondary gathering speeds the overall process of insertion by allowing all sheets to enter the inserter simultaneously.
Even more recently, devices for transferring a number of webs from a roll to a common cutting point where the webs are cut and folded into one packet have been employed by high volume mailers. The transferred webs are all fed and cut simultaneously. One of the cut webs is, in fact, the envelope which is subsequently formed and wrapped around other sheets in the group. Finally, the folded sheets for insertion have been fed from large rolls and nested with each other to create a single insert that has, generally, been utilized as part of the contents of a magazine or a newspaper.
However, to date it has not been possible to feed printed webs from a plurality of rolls to a single device that selectively cuts some or all of them, based upon a preprogrammed sequence, and subsequently inserts them into a separate envelope. Additionally, the opening of envelopes for insertion has been problematic. Highly specialized equipment has been necessary to spread an envelope opening sufficiently to allow insertion of contents.